


To Perceive

by monidon



Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Kinda, Spoilers, tags and rating may change, this is just my love song to this beautiful movie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-10 11:05:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13500542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monidon/pseuds/monidon
Summary: It's a feeling she can't shake and for years it eats at her... until she meets him.I hope Guillermo del Toro knows how much I love him.





	To Perceive

**Author's Note:**

> Doug Jones, too. 
> 
> This is my own little take on Elisa's point of view, so it's not completely canon, but the meat of it is there and that's what’s important. This will probably be a short series of interconnected one shots with no definite ending, but I don’t expect it to go beyond three chapters. Please excuse any spelling/grammar errors. I tried to catch them all, but I may go back and edit again.

For all of her little quirks and interests, Elisa remembers very little of her childhood in the orphanage and even less of her life before that—if at all. Despite this, the one thing she never forgot was the sense of longing for something she could never quite define; a void that was left deep inside of her that could never be filled.

It wasn’t as though she felt her story was particularly traumatic, though she had every right to believe so. The sisters kept it no secret that as an infant, she was found by the river with three evenly spaced slits on either side of her neck—likely the reason for her inability to speak. From there she was taken to the local hospital, bandaged, even put on a ventilator for some time, before finally being placed in the care of the church for the next eighteen years.

_God’s Little Miracle_ was one of their favorite nicknames for her. Their _Little Fish_ was the other. If she wasn’t playing with bubbles in the sink during chores, they would find Elisa flat on her stomach with her feet in the air, playing with the goldfish outside in the courtyard’s pond, or spending three times longer than the allotted time she was given for the bath every other evening. The children would tease her as kids are wont to do, often threatening to serve her for dinner during the church’s annual fish fry. She was too distracted by the sense of something being _off_ rather than be bothered by their words.

“Don’t feel right,” she would sign, her tiny hands grasping her silent language more and more every day. “I don’t belong here.”

_“All_ living creatures belong on this earth, Elisa.” The sisters would reply. “They are all precious, no matter what.”

She tried odd jobs after she left the orphanage, though it was hard when very few were willing to take on an uneducated, mute, woman. Somehow, after bouncing from place to place, janitorial work for the government seemed to be the perfect fit. They didn’t care that she couldn’t speak like them, or had no formal educational background. If she could clean and keep quiet—which she secretly felt was the reason they took her on in the first place—she would have a place there.

So she continued existing, busying herself with a predictable schedule of work and socialization, hoping the longing and feeling _off_ would disappear with the more distractions she took on. Yet like her daily schedule, it was persistent. She felt it when she woke with the setting sun, in the bathtub with her fingers pressed deep inside of her as her eggs boiled in the next room, and even on the bus as she played with the water droplets that lingered on the windows each night, making them dance to a song only she could hear.

When she met the one they called a river god, all of that seemed to disappear.

For a second—one sweet blissful second—she felt she had finally found that missing piece of her soul. It came as a shock to everyone, but Elisa? To Elisa, it felt like coming home.

It couldn’t last, though. She knew it, even if it broke her heart when thoughts of the inevitable would come to mind, reminding her that it was selfish to think he could spend the rest of his life sitting day in and day out alone in her bathtub. Still, she didn’t expect to fall in love so quickly, or even at all. Yet they understood each other—beyond words and names—in the way only kindred spirits could. He touched her scars as if he knew what stories lay beneath, loved her as naturally as it was to breathe, and held her in his arms like she was made for him and him for her. As much as she wanted to believe that alone was enough, it just wasn’t. She never could have guessed it would be ripped away in the blink of an eye.

It was kind of funny how she didn’t even feel the bullet hit her, even as she saw her blood gush from her stomach and blend with the rain. It was the sight of her love with hollow eyes and fading light that scared her the most.

“Please,” she felt herself beg, reaching for his limp hand, “not like this.”

But it was becoming too hard to think; the dark veil of death wrapping around and welcoming her to a deep sleep.

And then it wasn’t.

At first it felt like a dream. She couldn’t see or feel. It was just Elisa suspended and weightless in the dark nothingness of space, yet for the first time in her life, everything felt suddenly clear. Her vision cleared to her love holding her face between his webbed hands, kissing her gingerly as she gulped in deep breaths of air—no, not air, but water flowing inside and all around her.

“Fix.” She saw, his fingers brushing past one another before reaching up to caress her newly formed gills with careful reverence.

She furrowed her eyebrows in confusion and curled her fingers, rolling her hand. “How?”

“Fix,” he said again, this time pressing his hands against the flat of her stomach, the bullet wound completely healed over as if it never existed, despite the gaping hole in her favorite dress. None of that mattered now, it seemed. “Better.”

Elisa reached up and touched her gills, wanting to be scared at what she finds, but instead feels that endless void that never left suddenly so much more full than it’s ever felt before—more than when she first met him in the labs, and even more than when they joined together in her tiny bathroom in what now felt like a lifetime ago. It fills her to the brim and pours over that she doesn’t believe it can be real anymore. For the first time in her life, everything felt absolutely, unmistakably, positively right.

“Sad?” he tilts his head, concern clear in his eyes as his hand quickly cups her cheek, hoping the action would chase away her tears.

She doesn’t even realize she’s crying. Instead of answering, she places her hand over his heart and with her other tells him, “Home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yeeeeaaaaaah, so I'm convinced her scars weren't actually scars... 
> 
> Anyway, I've never identified so much with a main character like I have in this film and I have del Toro to thank for that. I know my writing isn't perfect, but this was one fic I just HAD to write. Reviews are very much appreciated. Thank you! :)


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